Film Friday: Maximum Overdrive (1986)

Why am I reviewing this turd? To deservedly slam Stephen King as a writer and as a director? No. That would be beating a dead horse. To ponder the fate of our greatest thespian, Emilio Estevez? Hardly. I’m reviewing this film for two reasons. First, I want to point out just how idiotic a film can be when no one bothers to think it through. Secondly, I want to point out why this film shouldn’t have been made in 1986, but is now ripe for a remake.

Plot

Written and directed by Stephen King, Maximum Overdrive is the story of what happens when the Earth passes through a comet which brings all the machines in Wilmington, North Carolina to life. The film begins with one machine after another killing the unsuspecting and surprised humans around them. Eventually, with everyone dead or just off screen somewhere, the film settles down on a truck stop where Emilio Estevez works as a parolee who is enslaved to the owner... an old Hollywood trope. Soon, trucks surround the truck stop and demand that the humans fuel them up so they can _____. It’s not explained. To force the humans to work, the trucks enlist a jeep with a machine-gun mount to threaten the humans. Estevez and the others eventually blow up the jeep and escape. As they slip away to an island on a sailboat, we are told that the problem ends when the Russian’s blow up a UFO with illegal space-based nuclear weapons.

Uh... What?

This film sucks in so many ways. Forget King’s utter lack of grace or vision as a director. Also forget the standard liberal insults King lobs... like the oppressive capitalist who treats parolees like slave labor or the Bible salesman named Billy Brett Graham who is also a quasi-rapist and later attacks a child – these are standard King smears. Forget the bad acting and the stilted dialog and the poor effects. Yeah, forget those things. Let’s instead talk about the real problem with this film: King never once thinks anything through.

Look, the premise is hard to swallow in the first place: machines come to life and attack humans. Hmm. How does that work exactly? Machines without brains or emotions suddenly find themselves sentient and they decide they want to kill and enslave the humans for no reason. That’s a tough sell. So when you pick a premise like this, you need to be extra careful to make sure that everything else you do throughout the film is believable. In other words, the harder your premise is to believe, the more careful you need to be to make the action within your scenes feel real or it reminds people of the unbelievability of the premise. Unfortunately, King doesn’t bother.

Indeed, one of the first things you notice is that King doesn’t worry about the laws of physics. For example, he has an electric carving knife attack a waitress even though the knife itself has no ability to move other than to vibrate or hold itself in place. This is like a screwdriver jumping off a table to stab you repeatedly. How does it move without legs or arms? How does it maintain an attack without any mass behind it to allow it to thrush itself through a resisting surface? It can’t, but King doesn’t care. We’re just meant to accept that it can because it’s alive now... as if that explained an obvious violation of the laws of physics. Similar, King violates our disbelief by having the machines do things they are not mechanically able to do. For example, a coke machine starts shooting coke cans out of itself at high speeds despite the lack of any mechanism within it that shoots cans.

These things immediately bring back your other doubts about the overall plot because it makes you realize that King isn’t sure what rules he’s using as a premise for this film. Are these machines come to life or are they supernatural forces which can manipulate the machines in ways the machines could not manipulate themselves? And if they are the latter, why can’t they do more? In fact, the rule King seems to set is that only electrical machines come to life and they can only do things the machines are designed to do. This is why the fuel truck cannot remove its own hoses and plug them into the tanks and why the pumps can’t float over and fuel the trucks. But then a car somehow slams its own hood and the electric knife jumps. And consider the jeep with the machine-gun mount. The gun is not electric in any way, i.e. it is purely mechanical. It’s mounted on a metal poll. To fire it, a human must pull the mechanical trigger. Yet, the jeep can operate it... somehow. So what are the rules? And why can’t the other guns they have work themselves?

This is the problem. Throughout this movie, King repeatedly fails to establish any set of rules by which the machines can operate. And then he keeps violating the few rules he seems to have set down to force his ideas to work. Each time this happens, it either highlights that he has broken his rules, or the lack of rules in the first place, or it calls into question why other things in the film haven’t happened: if X can do Y, then why didn’t the other Xs do Y... and why can’t Z do A, B or C? This would be a problem in any film, but really becomes a problem when the premise is as fantastic as this one: it constantly leaves you saying, “That doesn’t make sense,” which keeps reinforcing your doubts about the premise.

A Reboot, Are You High?

Despite the above, this film is screaming for a reboot. Think about it. This film was made in 1986. At that time, most machines were dumb. Computers were rare and few machines had one... most machines were purely mechanical in nature. Phones still had cords and used analog switches. Cars ran on carburetors and cables (remember “rolling down” your windows)? People weren’t dependent on the power grid for so much of their lives yet. So this film seemed far-fetched. But today, today it would be different. Today, everything is electronic. All those mechanical switches are now electronic and analog has given way to digital. And all the machines around us have brains... some smarter than us. Your phone owns you. You live online. You need the permission of machines to get your news, to talk to your friends, to start your car, to do your job, and even to get through doors. And how powerful are today’s machines? Forget the machine-gun jeep, how about a drone or robotic weapons or cruise missiles?

This is a premise that may have sounded interesting in 1986, but it was too premature. Technology had not yet reached the level that people could credibly believe that they had anything to fear from a revolt by machines. Today, those could be real concerns. If this movie were remade today, it could not only be made much tighter as there are infinitely more (and smarter) machines running our daily lives than there were in 1986, but the impact would be greater because we have become genuinely dependent on our machines... something we all realize and kind of dread. That’s why this film should not have been made in 1986, but should be rebooted today.

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Film Friday: Dreamcatcher (2003)

I’ve soured on Stephen King over the years. He steals his ideas from movies and his writing has become pedestrian and packed with nonsense and stereotypes. His movies are worse. Dreamcatcher is a good example of this. Indeed, despite being well-shot by Lawrence Kasdan and packed with solid actors like Morgan Freeman, Tom Sizemore, Timothy Oliphant and Thomas Jane, Dreamcatcher really highlights the shortcomings of King’s work over the past few decades.

** spoiler alert **

Dreamcatcher is the story of four friends who go to a cabin in Maine to relax. Unbeknownst to them, a hostile alien spaceship has crashed nearby and the Army has come to kill the aliens. While the Army is busy doing this, one of the aliens takes over the body of one of the friends and sets out for Boston to put worms into the water supply. These worms would infect the entire population and produce millions of aliens. But the four friends have a secret weapon. . . they had a retarded friend as a child, and as we all know, retarded kids have special powers. Here’s where this film fails:

● The Tired Formulas: Right out of the gates, Dreamcatcher presents us with the incredibly-tired, standard King formulas. You’ve got the evil, out-of-control military commander who decides to needlessly murder people. You’ve got the alcoholic. You’ve got the four friends who’ve been friends since childhood in their idyllic small town just like in Stand By Me and It. And the coup de grace, you’ve got the retarded kid who needs to be saved from the bullies, who then turns out to have special magical powers which are needed to solve the movie.

● The Rip-Offs: As you watch the film, you will get a strange sense of déjà vu, like you’ve seen everything in it before. This has become a standard feeling in King movies. Indeed, it seems that the way King writes books now is to rent all the popular movies on a particular topic, e.g. zombies, and then steal the best scenes from each movie and string them together in a new book. For example, when you watch something like Rose Red you can literally call out the movies he’s stealing from scene by scene. Dreamcatcher isn’t as bad as most of his recent work in this regard, but there is absolutely nothing original about the film at any point. King also seems determined to strew this film with references to better movies, like calling the alien virus “Ripley.” And to add insult to injury, he actually has Morgan Freeman tell you, “the men call the red stuff ‘Ripley’, after the broad in the Alien movies,” because you stupid viewers might not get such an incredibly obvious reference.

● The Nonsense: Where Dreamcatcher really underwhelms, however, is in all the nonsense at the heart of this film. Consider Duddits, the retarded kid. It’s rather asinine that King always pretends that retarded kids somehow have special powers. It’s like the racist portrayal of the “noble savage” (renamed “the magic negro”), where these non-mainstream individuals are presented as non-threatening, simpletons with a special gift of insight. King is famous for this, but that’s just the surface problem here.

The real problem is that Duddits isn’t human at all, he’s an alien in disguise, but no one seems to realize this -- including his own mother. Huh? The mother, by the way, lets one of the friends take cancer-stricken Duddits away to hunt the bad alien because she’d rather he died somewhere unknown rather than at home. Huh? Worst of all, for this movie to work, Duddits needs to misunderstand one of the other friends (as a kid) when he says “save the world another day.” Duddits hears this as “save the world from Mr. Gray.” So Duddits gives them all special powers which they will need 30 years later to fight against Mr. Gray himself, who crashes on earth by accident. In other words, Duddits knew that the four friends would go on vacation in 30 years near the crash site of an alien ship that just happened to be carrying Mr. Gray, and which would crash unintentionally, and that Mr. Gray would just happened to stumble upon the four friends in the vast Maine wilderness. Yeah, no coincidence there.

This is so far beyond the level of believable coincidence that you have to assume Duddits can predict the future. But if that’s the case, why not just visit them at the cabin and save them? Or tell them what they need to know. Also, how in the world can Duddits be portrayed as a genuinely retarded kid and adult, yet he ends up being more than a match for the highly-intelligent and maniacal Mr. Gray?

Then you have the relationship between Freeman, who plays Colonel Curtis, and Sizemore, who plays Owen, his second in command. These two guys are tight friends who have been fighting aliens together long enough that Curtis plans to retire after this mission and hand over control of the unit to Owen. Yet most of their conversations are spent with Curtis explaining to Owen what the aliens are, what the virus is the aliens spread, and how to combat it. Wouldn’t Owen know this? Why does he treat Owen like he walked in off the street? Curtis even has to tell Owen the name of the virus, even though Owen says he just came from a briefing about it.

At the same time, Owen’s character is given a generic King-style conflict. He has been approached by the General in charge who thinks Curtis is needlessly killing civilians. Being a General, he could pretty much do what he wants to fix that. So he chooses to confide in Curtis’s best friend and send him to spy on Curtis? Huh? Owen, of course, immediately confesses this to Curtis and they share a touching moment of derision for their superiors. Owen specifically tells Curtis that he thinks the General’s theory about the virus “is crap.” Before the scene even ends, however, Owen completely changes positions and tells Curtis that the General’s theory is accurate and neither of them seem to notice this about face. He then betrays Curtis on the word of a guy claiming to be a psychic (Thomas Jane as Henry) after about twenty seconds of convincing. This leads us to another stupid scene where Owen tells Curtis he should come listen to Henry, and Curtis agrees, only to decide he’d rather go secretly shoot Henry for no logical reason whatsoever. Moreover, Henry is warning them that an alien got away. Why in the world would this cause Curtis to shoot him? It’s nonsense.

Then you have the virus. The aliens spread a red powder all over the place. This powder infects people causing worms to grow inside them. Those worms shoot out their rear ends, creating thousands of little aliens. All it takes is a little red dust to make this happen and that dust is everywhere. Yet, to eradicate this threat, the Army sends in 3-5 Apache helicopters to blow up the alien ship with what appear to be anti-aircraft missiles and mini-guns. And to make the viewer think this is effective, they talk about quarantining the area until they can blow up the ship. But think about this. If a single alien is away from the crash site, taking a leak for example, the Army’s plan will fail. And with this virus infecting every animal in the forest, there is simply no conceivable way to quarantine the forest and stop these worms from spreading everywhere short of a nuclear blast. In effect, King has created an unstoppable alien, but then tells us bullets can stop it.

Nothing in this film makes sense. And that’s become the problem with King’s recent works. The scenes play out fine, but the way he combines them is utter nonsense. Moreover, so many of his stories now depend on the most bizarre string of coincidences to put the heroes in a position to win the movie. This is just bad writing.

Finally, it should be pointed out that this film did a lot of damage to Lawrence Kasdan’s career. He admitted that in 2012 and said that several movies he was planning fell through immediately after this one failed commercially. I’m not surprised. Other than Kubrick’s The Shining, how many other directors launched or saved their careers doing a Stephen King film?

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Stephen King: Idea Consolidator

I’ve said before that I no longer have any respect for Stephen King. When he was young, he wrote a couple great horror stories. But then he got lazy or lost that creative spark or just became full of himself. And for the past couple decades, all he's done is steal ideas. He’s more like an idea consolidator now than an author, and I’ve never once heard him credit anything he’s stolen.

It’s even worse with his miniseries and his movies. I can literally go through Rose Red or The Mist or Dreamcatcher or Desperation and tell you scene by scene what he stole from other films and which movies they came from. It’s like his new method for writing involves renting all the films in a particular genre, writing down the parts he likes from each, adding a retarded kid with superpowers to some of the scenes, and then calling his publisher. . . puff! Another masterpiece.

And I’m not even going to get into what for an ass the man is. Not only is he a nasty liberal who has attacked Republicans and called our military illiterate morons, but he fills his stories with vile slanders aimed at the military and religious people. He’s also taken unprovoked cheap shots at other authors (like the author of Twilight). . . I guess she had nothing he could steal?

But I digress.

So why am I writing this? Apparently, King has a new project. This one will appear on Showtime. It’s called Under the Dome and is based on “his” 2009 novel of the same name. What’s it about? Tell me if this sounds familiar. . . “locals at a Maine vacation spot battle one another when a force field suddenly surrounds their town and cuts them off from the rest of the world.” Hmmm. Where have I heard that before? What could King possibly have been watching when this brilliant, “original” idea just popped into his head? Hmmm.

As a complete unrelated aside, have I ever mentioned that I enjoyed the Simpson’s movie? You know the one. . . where the locals battle one another when a dome suddenly surrounds Springfield and cuts them off from the rest of the world.

Anyhoo, back to the topic at hand, King’s ultra-original and unique idea will be produced by the only man in Hollywood who is a bigger jerk than King: Steven Spielberg. Yep, it will be a battle royal of cliché characters! I’m envisioning a race to save the population. On one team you’ll have the asthmatic kid, the fat kid who can’t stop eating and the Asian kid who builds gadgets. On the other team you’ll have the alcoholic writer and the retarded kid with superpowers. And they will struggle against aliens called the Evilrepublicans, whose leaders are Sarapalin and Rikperry, who want to kill all the residents so they can pump oil out of the ground and bathe in it. I can’t wait to see who they cast for each character. . . I’m betting Clive Owen plays a character named “Moe Szyslaker,” a club owner.

In all seriousness, guys like King depress me. He’s got more money than he will ever need. And you would think that after reaching that point, he would get more interested in writing higher quality stories, i.e. doing it for the love instead of the all mighty dollar. Apparently, you would be wrong. Am I missing something here?

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Film Friday: The Shining (1980)

You would think I wouldn’t like The Shining. Why? Because I don’t like Stephen King. His work is formulaic and stolen. Also, I respect Stanley Kubrick much more than I like his films. So I should hate The Shining, right? Well, no. At one point, King was a talented writer and The Shining was his high-water mark. And while I find Kubrick’s work lifeless, his casting of Jack Nicholson made this film great. Plus, there’s a lot more to this film than at first appears.

** spoiler alert **

You all know the story. Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) gets a job as the caretaker of the Overlook Hotel, where he and his family will be snowbound during the winter. He plans to use the time to finish his book. But things don’t go as planned as he and his son Danny start seeing ghosts. One thing leads to another and Jack goes insane and tries to kill his family. That sounds pretty straight forward. . . but is it?

Jack!

Before we get into the story itself, let me point out that the single most important element in this film is Jack Nicholson. Without him, this film would be a dud, and I mean that. As I’ve said before, Kubrick’s style is sterile and his characters are lifeless. They are not people you can care about. . . they are merely cardboard images that work the plot. But Nicholson is anything but cardboard. Nicholson is like a live grenade packed with the most excitable of human emotions. He is the kind of man who puts you on edge constantly. Even when he’s being nice, you watch him out of the corner of your eye for fear he may explode. He is the definition of “volatile.”

And that is exactly what the role of Jack Torrance needed. Torrance is an ex-alcoholic who seems to be falling into a “dry high.” As he falls, he gets increasingly paranoid and volatile. His paranoia is fed by the idea his wife and child are conspiring against him to blame him for being a failure as a father. This is the result of prior incidents where Jack lost his job for injuring a student and then injured Danny while he was drunk. Jack thinks his wife Wendy has never forgiven him for this and is poisoning their son’s mind. However, as written and filmed the role simply doesn’t have enough dialog to provide this information and its impact to the audience. That’s where the inner turmoil of Jack Nicholson comes in. He manages to convey all the instability, the paranoia, the repressed rage and the panicky instant-regret to tell you what you need to know about Torrance, even if the script doesn’t. Without Nicholson, Jack Torrance would be a boring man who inexplicably turns murderous.

Let me also add that Shelley Duvall is brilliant as the “abused wife” (Wendy). She is truly believable as she walks on eggshells around the explosive Jack and then shows genuine terror as he worsens.

Who Is Jack Torrance?

So, aside from Torrance’s inner nature, what isn’t so straight forward in this film? Well, let’s start with the ghosts. Are they real? If you read the novel, you might be surprised to discover that it’s very likely the ghosts aren’t real. Torrance is suffering the hallucinatory effects of a dry high and there is no evidence the ghosts exist. Even the injuries Danny sustains are likely caused by Torrance himself (interestingly, Wendy never does see the ghosts, only Jack, who is high, and Danny, who is abused). In the film, it’s more clear that the ghosts are real. In fact, in one instance, they actually help him in the physical world by unlocking a food locker and letting him out. So that kind of kills the mystery, right?

Yes and no. In its place you are given something much larger to consider. Who are these ghosts and what is their connection to Torrance? Obviously, they are haunting the Overlook and with Torrance being the caretaker, they have set their sights on him, right? Well, not so fast. In the scene in the bathroom between Jack and Grady, Jack identifies Grady the butler as the caretaker who killed his kids. But Grady denies this and responds, “You’re the caretaker, sir. You’ve always been the caretaker.” What does this mean? It could just be the ghost trying to trick Torrance, but there is one more piece of evidence to consider. At the end of the film, after Torrance dies, the camera pans in on a photo of a July 4th party at the Overlook in 1921. There, right in front, is Jack Torrance (see below). So how do we interpret this?

It’s possible the Overlook simply sucked him into its history and this is where it deposited him. But that’s unsatisfying as nothing else in the plot hints at people turning into photos. Where, for example, is the "new" picture of Dick Hallorann (Scatman Crothers)?

Could Jack be THE caretaker as Grady claims? It’s possible that Jack has reincarnated repeatedly and each time comes back as someone whose destiny is to become the caretaker and murder his family. This would be consistent with Grady’s statement that Jack has “always been the caretaker.” Interestingly, it would also be consistent with another piece of evidence. We are inclined to dismiss this idea because Jack points out that the butler is Charles Grady, the prior caretaker who killed his family. But the butler denies any knowledge of this and actually identifies himself as Delbert Grady. So it’s possible this man is not the Grady who was the caretaker. Does that make it Jack?

Maybe, except there’s a problem with the reincarnation theory. Charles Grady was the caretaker the year prior. That means Charles Grady and Jack Torrance were both alive at the same time. Thus, Jack could not be the reincarnation of Charles. It could be that both Jack and Grady are trapped in some sort of reincarnation circle, one after the other, but that would be kind of a new theory on reincarnation and there’s no evidence for it in the film. Thus, it’s unlikely this is what was meant. It could also be that Grady is simply lying, trying to manipulate Jack into following his lead. But then, how do we explain the 1921 picture?

We can’t discount the possibility that Kubrick simply threw in clues that make no sense, this wouldn’t be the first time (see the second black obelisk in 2001). But what about this: what if Jack isn’t really ever alive? What if Jack is a ghost. What if Jack did something in 1921 that trapped his soul at the Overlook, just like all the other ghosts, and now he’s destined to live out this nightmare of going insane and killing his family over and over and over again. One of the many views of hell or purgatory involves the person being forced to live their crimes/sins over and over forever. Maybe that’s what’s going on here? That would explain why he supposedly goes insane slowly over time, yet he started writing "all work and no play" instead of his book the moment he arrived at the hotel.

Sadly, there isn’t enough evidence to piece this together. But maybe that was intentional? Maybe the inexplicable aspect of this film adds to its terror? We honestly don’t know what is going on with Jack or why the ghosts have targeted him or why he’s so open to them. We don’t know what’s real and what isn’t. Who is Delbert Grady? Who is Jack? We see a wall of blood coming down the elevator, dead girls in the hallway and a woman turn into a rotting corpse, but is any of it real? We just don’t know. But maybe not knowing is more terrifying than knowing for sure -- it’s the fear of the danger yet to come as compared to knowing the extent of your trouble.

Also, maybe this is part of Kubrick’s plan to disorient us. He does this masterfully throughout the film. For example, he constantly switches back and forth between huge cavernous rooms that make us feel insecure, unprotected and exposed, and the cramped family quarters and narrow curvy hallways that make us feel claustrophobic. He gives us the promise of help, only to take it away the moment it arrives. He makes the ghosts unreal, only to let them do something in the real world (yet Wendy still never sees them, so are they really real?). He tells us Jack is slowly going insane, yet he started writing “all work and no play” in his book from the moment he arrived at the Overlook. Doesn't that mean he was insane before he got here? None of this adds up and as a consequence, we can never get a single point of reality onto which we can grasp. We are thus disoriented from the start, and we can never get our bearings. So maybe the fact that we can’t explain exactly what Jack is just adds to the terror because maybe he’s a real guy being haunted, or maybe he's just going insane, or maybe he’s something much worse that we can’t quite understand.

Interesting isn’t it?

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